You get the point. Of course, back in December when IGN Movies and a few other outlets visited Troublemaker Studios in Austin, Texas -- the set of Fox's upcoming return to the roots of its beloved alien-hunting franchise, Predators -- this was a topic of great interest to all present. Luckily, makeup and effects maestro Gregory Nicotero of KNB EFX Group was on hand to break it down for us.

Click above to watch the trailer, clips and character featurettes from Predators.

"There is a Falconer, there is the Dog Handler and there is Black. Those are our three designations for our Super Predators," Nicotero explained while motioning to a not-surprisingly monstrous thing -- one of the Super Predators (a.k.a. the Berserker Predators). "This is one of our three Super Predators. Each one of them has a different personality and a different function. So this is our Dog Handler Predator. There are these alien hunting dogs that they use to flush out our heroes and track them. So with this guy, you can notice the armor on his legs and the armor on his arms is there because the dogs have these big horns and spikes. So it's sort of a protective mode as well."

Which of course you'd need when wrangling horn- and spike-covered alien mutts. But the Earth-animal analogies don't end there with this motley crew of muthers. For this film takes place on an alien world, a new frontier for the franchise -- and one that opens up a slew of new possibilities in terms of the creature designs.

"And then of course they all have their plasma cannons, and each one of them has a different function," continues Nicotero. "There is another Super Predator called Baltimore, and one of his weapons is a UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] falcon that can launch off his shoulders. So they can not only track with their different sensors and helmets, but they can also track from the sky. It's just another weapon that they use when they're hunting. And then we have our Black Super Predator, who's basically the leader of the three of these creatures."

But for all the newfangled alien action in the film, this crew also remembers where the dreadlocked Predators first began -- back in the original 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger classic. Nicotero, director Nimrod Antal and producer Robert Rodriguez sought to pay tribute to the innovative creature design from that film.

"Game over, man -- game over!"

"We refer to him as Classic," says Nicotero of their callout to the old-school Predator. "We recreated him when [our puppeteer] Shannon [Shea] worked at Stan Winston Studios on the original version and he worked on the set. So we were actually there. … We were going back to the original film in terms of tone and spirit. You know, when you watch the last AvP movie, it's like a Freddy Vs. Jason movie. They just took out Freddy and Jason and put in aliens. So it's really going back to the spirit of what the film was originally intended to be. … It was really the first time that we had seen this Classic Predator look since the first movie, because the designs had changed and everyone put their fingerprints on it here and there. So it kind of went back to the beginning. It was really exciting for everybody. It was one of those situations where you can't just take a mold off of the shelf and go, 'O.K., well here's the Predator hand.' And now we're going to make every single piece, all the dreadlocks and all of the jewelry on the dreadlocks. And every single piece had to be sculpted and molded and designed and manufactured."

Derek Mears, a.k.a. Jason Voorhees from the Friday the 13th remake, is playing the Classic Predator. At approximately 6' 3" tall, he's a big guy. But not so much when compared to the actors playing the Super Predators.

"They are a lot taller and, as you can see, a lot leaner," says Nicotero. "Robert Rodriguez and Nimrod, when we first started the project, they used a really great analogy. [They] said the Classic Predator is a cassette tape and the new Predators are the iPod version. So that kind of triggered a lot of visual things in my head, in terms of making them taller, making them sleek and keeping the armor really close to the body so that they are not bulky, because we wanted to get the idea that they are fast and that they're elegant and that they are efficient. Even in terms of the dreadlocks and stuff … [we wanted] that kind of Rasta look, but we swept all the dreadlocks back. We made the face a lot longer. We just wanted everything about them to look more elegant, like a black widow. We wanted it to just be really deadly looking."